Studdering SATA Video Playback

Sidecar wrote on 12/4/2003, 9:44 PM
System: Intel D875PZB Mobo with 3.0gHz 875 Intel HT chip, 800mHz FSB. 1GB RAM

Four drives total:
Two IDE 120GB Western Digital drives on the C: and its slave bus

Two SATA 120GB Western Digital drives on the two SATA bus ports.

All four drives indicate a throughput of around 23-26 MB/Sec.

The video framerate studders badly on playback, sometimes stopping for a second or two. Audio continues with a hitch.

Video was originally digitized to the C: drive by mistake, then moved to the SATA drive. It worked fine on the C: drive.

Any ideas why it doesn't play back from the SATA?

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 12/4/2003, 9:53 PM
DMA enabled? Anything sharing the IRQ? DV is stuttering, or is it some other video format?
Sidecar wrote on 12/4/2003, 11:01 PM
Don't know if or how to enable DMA. Where is that contolled from?

Video plays fine from normal IDE drive on the slave port to the C: drive.

Diagnostics say the SATA drive reads at only 14.62 mb/s. Yesterday it read at 23.57mb/s.

What could change it? No problem with fragmentation. There are no other files on it to speak of.
Randy Brown wrote on 12/6/2003, 7:12 AM
I just bought a new SATA HD too and I'm having the same problem ( I also coincidently have the exact same system). I know for my other HDs, to ensure I had DMA enabled I would go to Device Manager and then IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers, but I can't find where to do this for the SATA. Anybody know where to locate it?
Spot said>>Anything sharing the IRQ?<< It doesn't show up in System Info under Conflicts/Sharing but then again I can't even find it under IRQs! However the drive does show up in Explorer along with the folder of the mentioned stuttering video.
>>DV is stuttering, or is it some other video format?<< DV, AVIs straight from a Canon XL1s (via a DV deck). Another peculiar thing that may send up a flag for you, I was trying to save a .veg with copied clips and noticed it was taking a very long time so I went to Task Manager and it reported a whopping 1-3% CPU usage!
I have been having some issues with this new PC and I plan to completely reformat the OS drive and reinstall Win XP on Monday, but I don't think it has anything to do with this right?
BTW, I defrag almost every night.
TIA,
Randy
rmack350 wrote on 12/7/2003, 12:40 AM
Maybe it's a power supply issue? It's a wild guess but you do have a lot of stuff in there...try to simplify the system.Take out the IDE slave and the second SATA drive.

What graphics card are you using?

Everyone is using western digital drives but I'm suspicious of them. We tried to build a mirroring raid on a Promise card with WD drives and the array just wouldn't stay up. Promise said the WD drives were a problem for them

Taking the software tack, how does that same footage play in Windows Media Player?

Rob Mack